Have you heard of
Just-in-time, TQM, The rise of Toyota as a powerful global
player in the automotive industry, even surpassing the gaping
mouths of the big three in the United states?
You would have
certainly come across the term 'Supply Chain Management'.

It
sounds like jargon, doesn't it? Well, it isn't so difficult to
understand and it is something most manufacturing ( even
services!) industries indulge in today.

Supply Chain management
basically

means that the process
of managing the whole process of finding a suitable raw
material, processing it and converting it into something
valuable or useful that could be sold to the market.

The better a company is in managing its resources, the
process of locating its raw

materials,
processing them, working on
them, the entire production process, the out put, the packaging
and even the labelling might constitute a simple supply chain
management case study.

According to the CIO Magazine, Supply chain management (SCM) is
the combination of art and science that goes into improving the
way your company finds the raw components it needs to make a
product or service and deliver it to customers. The following
are five basic components of SCM.

Supply Chain Management has a lot of visible and also
invisible elements to it. The glamorous parts might probably
be the vendor management and the like. It is the invisible
parts of the supply chain that attain the status of primary
importance.

The importance of supply chain management has been growing
steadily over the recent years and more so because of the
fact that the companies have been growing larger and larger
in size.

Due to this enormous increase in size, the
companies gain more cost efficiency when they
outsource some of the functions that

they ought to do
themselves to other specialized service companies that
do the needful.

This enables the larger companies
to be more flexible, focus more on their core competencies and
create more value for their customers, while retaining profits
by reducing costs at the same time. The ubiquitous, simple to
use, nature of the Internet has made it possible to automate
some of its supply chain management elements with the help of
robust supply chain management software ( Though it is always
not so easy to do the implementation and execution part ! ).

The extended supply chain - the vendors and their vendors
network, has always become a critical link in the new era of
Modern supply management theory and has taken it to another
realm where everything boils down to cost cutting such that the
whole process can create value for the customer. (Source :
Snowman Frozen Foods Ltd.)